Shai Langen is an Amsterdam based material designer and visual artist. In his work he transforms and reshapes the human body in a performative and intuitive way, by means of material experiment.
Fascinated by the way material becomes form and form transforms to symbolism, he animates material and uses this material to explore the way we think about the body.
His work “Chimera” is a project consisting of an ongoing material and visual research into a contestable future of the human body, in which the body is grown and cultivated.
Here it has become an amalgam of the synthetic and the organic. Where synthetic processes mutate the skin into fungi like textures, like living organisms feeding off its host. Cellular structures constricting its carnality, growing in stasis, waiting to unveil its newly formed functions. This new malleable body has become a place where plastic parasitic substances emulate the immaterial. Intuitively revealing its architect.
These bodies guide us through an era where new technologies redefine the human form and test our understanding of what it means to be human. Moving away from our archaic self to a liquid self, that is continually undergoing construction and reconstruction. A world where the solid has become fluid and is in constant motion.
Images courtesy of Shai Langen
Discover: www.shailangen.com | vimeo.com/99182850
